thinkbroadband

Third quarter results from BT Group
Friday 09 February 2007 09:00:11 by
Andrew Ferguson

The BT Group and its various divisions have published their third quarter results which be read in full over at www.btplc.com.

Openreach who look after the copper local loop saw its revenues increase 3% in the third quarter to £1,314 million. The landmark figure of 1.5 million LLU lines provided by Openreach has
been reached, which should ensure that BT will go ahead with plans for price reductions on IPstream and Datastream products scheduled for May 2007. Openreach provides around 4.2 million wholesale
line rental (WLR) lines. The third quarter was very busy with BT unbundling 457,000 lines, and moving 190,000 lines to the WLR product.

BT Wholesale started a foundation trial for ADSL2+ services in Cardiff, as part of the steps towards rolling out ADSL2+ across the network from 2008 for the twenty-first century network (21CN)
rollout. Part of the trial has involved transmitting high definition editions of the BBC show Torchwood using the ADSL2+ services.

BT Retail it appears has performed well, showing a growth of 1% which is in line with positive first quarter growth seen in the last four years. In broadband terms BT Retail had 3.2 million
customers, an increase of 239,000 across the quarter. This accounts for 34% of the net additions to DSL and LLU in the quarter, the highest for over two years. This gives BT Retail a 32% share of the
installed base of DSL & LLU lines. In terms of numbers this means there is a close draw in terms of broadband customers between Virgin Media and BT Retail. BT Retail will recognise the Plusnet
customer numbers in the fourth quarter report.